Ann Demeulemeester home furnishings assortment launches at Serax

Ann Demeulemeester home furniture assortment launches at Serax

Belgian trend designer Ann Demeulemeester requirements small introduction. 30-seven several years given that she recognized her namesake label and set Belgian style on the world map, Demeulemeester’s flair for austerity, minimalism and the unforeseen is alive and effectively. She returned to helm her eponymous label in 2021, immediately after departing in 2013, and her reappearance in the public sphere has been bolstered by her other pursuits in structure. In September 2022, she unveils a fully fledged household furniture selection with fellow Belgian Serax, with whom she has designed collections of tableware, glassware and lighting considering that 2019. The furniture collaboration, a first for Demeulemeester and her longtime husband or wife and collaborator Patrick Robyn, brings to lifestyle but one more facet of the exclusive earth they have established alongside one another more than the past a few many years.

Ann Demeulemeester home furnishings with Serax

As with her other undertakings, Demeulemeester’s spin on furnishings style and design emanates a refined and cerebral aura. Her elemental strategy to sort signifies that several of the pieces are grounded in clear traces, offering rise to expressive experimentations in dimensionality.

The collection’s slender, curved again ‘Elé’ eating chairs, and the ‘Eloïs’ table, with its flat, rectangular aircraft positioned delicately on major of four spindle-like legs, are both practically skeletal in mother nature, even though in distinction, the ‘Ono’ couch and ‘Beth’ daybed each show rounded profiles, loaded upholstery and elongated silhouettes that develop an similarly remarkable presence on the other finish of the spectrum.

‘[Patrick and I] have usually felt a solid affinity with furnishings, and the lockdown was the ideal time to begin doing the job on our quite very own collection,’ says Demeulemeester, who the moment lived in the Maison Guiette, the only surviving property in Belgium designed by Le Corbusier. ‘I make some thing since I skip it, I want it and I can’t uncover it. The crew at Serax are respectful and supportive, and we all share the exact sense of exhilaration.’

Continuing in the vein of the prior collections created for Serax, Demeulemeester’s home furnishings assortment is an investigation of mild and shadow. There is a persistent interaction of contrasts, equivalent to her sartorial collections, which reiterates how unified her inventive method is in spite of the vary of mediums. ‘[The furniture and fashion collections] are like brother and sister. They have the same mother and father,’ she suggests. ‘It is a mirrored method. You produce an image in your head and do the job as prolonged as wanted to materialise it.’ 

By checking out the tensions between toughness and fragility, construction and nonchalance, the precious and the functional, and geometry and proportion in a new spatial manner, Demeulemeester’s furniture assortment delivers a freshness to her enduring design philosophy. This also extends to the possibilities of colour, which span deep black, off-white, moss environmentally friendly, pale pink and a vivid burnt orange, which are matched with sudden, idiosyncratic choices in textiles and upholstery, all exclusive to the selection. 

The collaboration’s last flourish comes in the form of a specially built showroom to present the assortment, made by Robyn at Serax’s Antwerp headquarters. Comprised of curved surfaces, discreet openings and a wall of curtains, the space sets the scene for the unforeseen. §